Smoke 2013 trial very slow

new to smoke, looking to switch from fcpx but when running trial smoke is very slow to respond to anything i do. i love the layout but cant figure out how i can be productive with such delays. I have installed it on a 2011 macbook pro 2.2 ghz i7 17" with 4gb ram and a 2009 Macpro 8 core with 10 gig of ram and ati radeon 5770 vid card. smoke responds the same on both. I am trying to edit in 1080p with DSLR footage from Canon 5d mkii. When i setup project the only choice that seemed to fit was apple prores 422. ive switched from preview fx to realtime with no improvements. Any help would be greatly appreciated. do i need to convert footage to prores with compressor first, i certainly hope not. I love what autodesk is doing but at this price point it has to be at least as resposive as the other NLEs to be considered.

ok thanks, i actually downloaded some apple prores footage to use as a test and was amazed at the difference in speed. Other apps handle 5d codec pretty well. This creates a real dilemma for me because i shoot most of my footage with 5d and 7d. id love to move to smoke but transcoding is kinda taking a step backward at this point. maybe autodesk will let me try again when i get blackmagic camera which shoots directly in smoke optimized formats.

As I mentioned above (sort of) Smoke's timeline resolution does not only contain pixel resolution but also bit depth. 5D footage is 8 bit. You either edit in an 8 bit TL or you edit in a 10 bit TL and every single bit of footage will have a Resize Soft-Effect added which again creates a lot of unnecessary render time and slows things down.

Hans already mentioned that Smoke is not currently optimized to interact very well with 5D and 7D footage.

The other issue I can highlight looking at your Hardware specs is the 4Gb of ram in the MacBook Pro. We recommend to run Smoke on a system with at least 8Gb of ram to have better performances. You should have overall better performance on your other system.

To transcode the 5D/7D media into ProRes during import, in the media hub window under the general settings, you will see a button labelled "CREATE PROJECT MEDIA". This is the same as creating optimised media in FCPX.

Now drag and drop your clips from the browser into the media library and Smoke should transcoder the footage in the background. You can click the JOBs tab to monitor the progress.

However you could still start working with the clips and smoke will use the original media until the intermediates have been made and Smoke will automatically swap them out for you.

5D/7D as is a must, period. This needs to be sorted out because if Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine can handle it, Smoke should as well... Especially w/an Quadro card in there. 80% of the stuff shot at my facility is Canon. Transcoding, whether R3D, 5D, AVC, P2, you name it, which was S.O.P. last year, is not an option in 2012. Hell, at least back in the digitizing days I could watch the footage, take notes, etc and make use of the time. Transcoding is simply wasted time... Often, unbillable! Not only is it wasted time, but in the case of FCP, converting to ProRes actually affected color. I had no idea until a gent from the Bandito Bros pointed it out to me @ NAB. That being said, I've not seen the same as Smoke converts to DPX, it's native format. Footage looks pristine, but native in 2012, doesn't mean the same thing in 2013... Or does it? BTW, if I have to EDIT in ProRes or the like just to be able to work, we're defeating the purpose of format independence.

Now, I understand fully what Smoke can do, I've been on it since Fire. But we're not talking compositing, I would never expect to work in anything but uncompressed or minimal compression like DNxHD, ProRes. We're talking editing, which in todays world should happen in any format. If I can't get 2013 working as fast as PP, I won't add more seats in my facility. It's just that simple.

At this point I'm really just frustrated. Apple ProRes plays back well until any fx are added then I'm down to a crawl. This is on a MacPro 3,1 with 10gigs ram and radeon 5770 video card. This software has been totally unusable on my computers and i have even gone as far as updating my OS to 10.7.4 which i really didn't want to do. Is my computer too old to run this efficiently? Its an 8-core machine. If I add cc, it gives me a unrendered message even with preview fx on. I can barely place things and edit on the timeline let alone get to the real powerful features of Smoke. Whats really crazy is that I can run Shake 4.1 on both of my computers at full 1080p with lots of nodes connected including cc and blurs and everything is essentially realtime. Am I missing something. I even tried ProRes LT to no avail. Is there a way I can see if Smoke is utilizing all 8 cores.

Right there with you Duane... Same MP except running an NVidia card. I have yet to get a format to run smoothly. My frustration, I'm a Smoke guy and have been waiting for the day it would be my all-in-one solution... Not only at the office but at home too! FCP, Symphony and most recently Adobe PP are all running fine so I'm quite perplexed. I've ordered a Quadro 4K so let's see what happens.